I'm taking a leaf (ha) out of my sister-in-law's book and blogging my CSA adventures! We've joined up with Waltham Fields Community Farm CSA for Summer 2013 and are splitting the harvest with friends. This is also the official food blog of the Boston Whitecaps.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Week Eleven: Halfway

Well, we crossed the halfway mark of the CSA this week… time
certainly has been flying. The weather’s been weird, which seems to have led
the farm crew to worry that the harvest would start shifting into autumn mode.
Given this week’s harvest, though, I’m pretty sure the plants are still in
summer production mode. The tomatoes, anyway.

We could pick a half-pint of raspberries from the fields. This one is about the size of the pad of my pinky finger.And now I understand why these are so darn expensive at the grocery store!

We could pick ten (!) things this week… and we could double
up on a few things. When Matt & Aly learned that they had the option to
double the “five pounds of tomatoes” item… I think they actually jumped for
joy. So we came home with ten pounds of tomatoes! They also got shallots to
share, some potatoes, and lettuce. I got more purple peppers, carrots, beets,
corn to share, and a watermelon.

There's nothing here to compare for scale, but this is what ten pounds of tomatoes looks like.

The size of my cookie jar!

After we sweated buckets at yoga, we came back to revel in
the tomato glory and make some salsa, which Aly’s going to post about, yay!
Matt and Aly grilled up some of the corn for dinner with chicken drumsticks,
and I made some pickled peppers and carrots. I had a couple leftover white
ones, so I chopped up two each of the purple and white peppers, then diced up
about four large (for the farm) carrots about the same size. I poured my usual
made-up-proportions pickling mix over everything, and it’s all sitting in the
fridge getting yummy.

What's up, doc?

Peter Piper is jealous of my pickled purple peppers.

I’m not sure what I want to do with the watermelon just yet…
I mean, there are so many things I could do! I’ve used a melon baller to make
watermelon ice cubes for my water (also did this with sliced cucumbers for
Pimm’s cups!), but I feel like I should do something more exciting than that.

Speaking of Pimm’s cups, the English dinner with our parents
went really well! Dan, my pie crust expert-in-residence, learned something
about how we can apply the pie crust next time (what exactly, I already forget
– crusts are not my thing!), the stew itself was great, and my Pimm’s cups were
ratest “best ever”. I also exploded the Camembert container again, but I made
sure to put it on a small foil-covered baking sheet before putting it in the
oven!

Still not perfect... but not all over my oven!

We got the Pimm’s cups recipe/proportions straight off the Pimm’s web site: 1 part Pimm’s to 3 parts lemonade. As I was making the first batch, Dan realized that in the UK they might refer to Sprite as “lemonade”… but as we already had a gallon of Market Basket’s finest in the fridge, we stuck with that – to great success, I feel. The week prior I had washed, quartered, and frozen a container of strawberries, so those were ready to do double duty as ice cubes and a little flavor. I also froze cucumber slices (same deal), and lemonade in an ice cube tray. I garnished each glass with some mint from the yard (what little I could find after Dan had gotten to it with the weed whacker), and by Jove, they were delicious.